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[ENTP] ENTP Ennui

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Sure, there are challenges in life, but they're either like crosswords - pointless, gain nothing by doing them, or exams - you know you could pass it if you really wanted to, but don't care enough to do the work, and it's not worth bothering with the work because pwning it won't give satisfaction when you never doubted you could anyway.

Do you ever feel like ennui will utterly engulf you if you don't keep on "adding plates", to use Synarch's brilliant analogy? Do you yearn for something that will be able to force you out of autopilot? Stop this feeling of coasting through 'til you get to an important part that never comes?

Haha. Yeah, it's like spinning a bunch of plates. The moment you have it working okay you add more. Occasionally you break them all.
 

Domino

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(I shall sow your fields with tares and salt! That should break the ol' routine! :D)

I think what you mean is something unplanned AND inevitable pushing you into a "forced march" - mentally, physically, emotionally. To loose control of that area but in a good way, a way that activates what can't be touched or actualized by you, but IS you at the same time. The removal of the hothouse flowers in favor of the unknown that could naturally erupt from primed but fallow earth.

Different things fall out when someone/thing else is doing the shaking.

It's hard when a Q needs something new. ;) (Speaking of which, he was on tv late last night hounding the heck out of Picard, and we thought of you. lol)
 

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I think what you mean is something unplanned AND inevitable pushing you into a "forced march" - mentally, physically, emotionally.

Yeah, that's it basically. But I can't remember ever feeling like anything did all of those. One, at most, so I stay on autopilot, just coast along. Though, it has to be something constructive, that I can see a clear point to, that benefits the greater good and not just me.

Just wondered if it was just me or a typical ENTP thing, and how other ENTP's deal with it.
 

Domino

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I'm not ENTP, Sub, but I will say, I feel that way too. Like it takes something to light a fire under me or take things in a different but profound direction and I know to force that would be artificial and yet I wish for this mysterious energy to act. It has to just "happen" and that's hard to take. Autopilot is what gets me through most things, but I don't want to find I've gone X amount of distance and not recalled any of it, like semi-lucid dental surgery.
 

jenocyde

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I feel like I will die if I stop moving, or get used to the motion.
 

Economica

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Not being an ENTP I can't commiserate but I can direct you to someone who is, can and has made music about it. Try listening to the album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? by of Montreal. Here are sample lyrics:

A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger said:
I spent the winter with my nose buried in a book
While trying to restructure my character
'Cause it had become vile to its creator

Gronlandic Edit said:
(The surrealists were just
Nihilists with good imaginations)

I am satisfied
Hiding in our friend's apartment
Only leaving once a day
To buy some groceries
Daylight, I'm so absentminded
Nighttime meeting new anxieties
So am I erasing myself?
Hope I'm not erasing myself

I guess it would be nice to give my heart to a god
But which one, which one do I choose?
All the churches fill with losers, psycho or confused
I just want to hold the divine in mind
And forget all of the beauty's wasted

Let's fall back to earth and do something pleasant
We fell back to earth like gravity's bitches
(Physics makes us all its bitches)

I guess it would be nice to help in your escape
From patterns your parents designed
All the party people dancing for the indie star
But he's the worst faker by far
But in the set, I forget all of the beauty's wasted

I guess it would be nice
Show me that things can be nice
I guess it would be nice
Show me that things can be nice

And here's an acoustic live version of a song about battling depression:

[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iuWPtiOLBI&feature=related"]Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse (acoustic live version)[/YOUTUBE]

The original (zany) version of this song can be heard on the band's MySpace page (linked above).
 

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can't say as I relate to those lyrics at all Economica! It's like the total polar opposite of me!!! LOL your dude in the song feels overwhelmed by choices, thinks they're all bad, and so decides to do nothing and atrophy in a pit of self pity! OTOH, I feel like there's a lot out there that's good, i'm very optimistic and upbeat and my response to the frustration of not being able to REACH the worthwhile things is to go out and keep trying, keep looking. I resolutely REFUSE to feel sorry for myself.

Jenocyde - yeah you've got it there, you know what I'm talking about. Ever feel like you're a rolling stone, eh?

Pink - yeah it's a fucker ain't it?
 

simulatedworld

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Sure, there are challenges in life, but they're either like crosswords - pointless, gain nothing by doing them, or exams - you know you could pass it if you really wanted to, but don't care enough to do the work, and it's not worth bothering with the work because pwning it won't give satisfaction when you never doubted you could anyway.

Do you ever feel like ennui will utterly engulf you if you don't keep on "adding plates", to use Synarch's brilliant analogy? Do you yearn for something that will be able to force you out of autopilot? Stop this feeling of coasting through 'til you get to an important part that never comes?

I'm going to plagiarize this for my autobiography. Nobody tell bananatrombones.
 

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There have been a couple of times actually that I remember in my life, when I've emerged from something, breathless, grinning from ear to ear and feeling really alive, the only words I could say being "Fuck me, I really wasn't sure for a minute that I'd make it, I thought I was toast back there!"

edit - actually the unplanned part isn't as important to me as I thought when I first read Pink's posts. It could be something I deliberately plan to take on, but I've got to be able to perceive from the beginning that the difficulty rating is set to "almost impossible". ALMOST. Even better is "everyone else thinks it's impossible, but I can see a way".
 

Synarch

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I actually long for the end of the world sometimes. My head seems to be there already. The clarity of survival. The pure adrenaline of the apocalypse. I'm stuck in survival mode with no crisis. So, I make my own. Life: the crisis of existence. In the end, we all approach our own apocalypse anyway.
 

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I actually long for the end of the world sometimes. My head seems to be there already. The clarity of survival. The pure adrenaline of the apocalypse. I'm stuck in survival mode with no crisis. So, I make my own. Life: the crisis of existence. In the end, we all approach our own apocalypse anyway.

Shit man, I got a lump in my throat reading that! Someone sent me a Facebook quiz link the other day asking what I thought were the top five things to lead to my untimely demise.

I put in "driving too fast", cos I do that, night time driving on my own you know, hoping if you keep the intellect occupied enough with the bad conditions and stuff, it'll STFU long enough for me to see if I can feel anything.

And I put "alcohol", cos that's something I tend to resort to when you get those times when you're so full of repressed feelings that you can't name or do anything about, it really is the only answer.

But the one I knew was over and above all the others, but which obviously wasn't listed, was "running out of obligations to the world and so voluntarily leaving it". But I didn't think of that in a depressive sort of way - the picture I would've added if I could've figured out the widget there, would've been this one:

ascension.jpg


Release, relief, you know? From the pointlessness, monotony and predictability of it all and into the greatest unknown of all.
 

Synarch

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I put in "driving too fast", cos I do that, night time driving on my own you know, hoping if you keep the intellect occupied enough with the bad conditions and stuff, it'll STFU long enough for me to see if I can feel anything.

Me too... I've gotten like ten speeding tickets in the last few years.

And I put "alcohol", cos that's something I tend to resort to when you get those times when you're so full of repressed feelings that you can't name or do anything about, it really is the only answer.

I don't drink much for this reason. I KNOW if I do, I'll lose my grip, which is not very tight anyway.

But the one I knew was over and above all the others, but which obviously wasn't listed, was "running out of obligations to the world and so voluntarily leaving it". But I didn't think of that in a depressive sort of way - the picture I would've added if I could've figured out the widget there, would've been this one:

Release, relief, you know? From the pointlessness and predictability of it all and into the greatest unknown of all.

I think about death almost every day. I don't know why. It's just always there in the background. The ground approaching in slow motion.
 

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I don't drink much for this reason. I KNOW if I do, I'll lose my grip, which is not very tight anyway.

Yeah, I've lost the plot there once or twice... not for long though.

I think about death almost every day. I don't know why. It's just always there in the background. The ground approaching in slow motion.

Me too, but not in a morbid way, that's the weird thing that I can't seem to explain to people. I'm not depressed, though I know I might sound it from this thread!! lol I remember when I was a teenager studying the Tudors and I learned about St Thomas Moore you know, how when he was executed for his beliefs, he died gracefully and with a smile and a joke with the executioner. I was fascinated by it and read his biographies and loads of stuff about him, and how he sorta wrestled in prison with the instinct for survival and fear of death, and just became totally accepting of it.

Really made a mark on me actually. I've made a point of forcing myself to remember that I'm mortal, regularly, really think about it. Just makes you have like, no interest at all in all the BS in life doesn't it? Like let's just cut that all out and gtf on with it. When I worked as a chaplain and had to visit people in their deathbeds and stuff, so many of them saying they wished they'd realized sooner that all that status, popularity, keeping up with the joneses, vanity stuff was BS and they wish they'd thought about what really mattered younger and put their energies into that.

I reckon it's stuff like that that's at the bottom of why my mom says she despairs of me. It's just you know, she still thinks those things matter so it bothers her that I don't care about them, not one little bit. So she does stuff all the time that when you say "why the hell did you do that?" she can only answer "I don't know", but whatever it is I've done or said you can ask me and I can tell you exactly why, and stand by it.

Eh, what are we doing talking like this, we're the shallowest of the NT's, remember, or isn't that what they keep saying? ;)
 

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so I think, where the ennui comes from perhaps, is that we really need things to MEAN something, it's got to be totally engaging, but cos we're smelling the shades of BS on so much of normal life, just nothing's really engaging us, so there's nothing that's able to keep our interest up to the level where it becomes genuinely challenging.

Having realized how futile so much stuff is, I guess we're left trying to find something that has meaning and substance, that throws open the bigger picture so we can see exactly where we're supposed to put ourselves. Like reality's a big carpet or tapestry and we're each individual threads - it's relentless wanting to step back, back, back, to see more and more of the carpet, to know where we should thread ourselves... until it's revealed, everything else is just pointless.

I guess that's the bitch of having Ne for a mistress. Working general to specific, if you've gotta get the big picture in place before you can start working down, when it comes to the Big Things, that's a harsh mistress, innit. If you were an Si-ite and worked from specific to general, you could be happy doing your specific things without having any idea how pointless they are :laugh:
 

simulatedworld

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Me too... I've gotten like ten speeding tickets in the last few years.

Don't you hate when people say things like, "I HOPE THE EXTRA 15 MINUTES YOU SAVED BY SPEEDING WAS WORTH THE 200 DOLLAR TICKET LOL"

No, not on its own, but combined with the amount of time I've saved by speeding on the 99.99% of occasions where I didn't get caught, it was damn well worth the 200 bucks. It's like buying a license to drive faster.

The police would have to catch me a significant portion of the time to make speeding not economically profitable (though I guess this depends on what value you place on your time.)
 

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what you guys need are the ancient, winding, dark, pot-holed and completely police free countryside lanes of Europe - at night, it's like having your own private race track :cheese:

edit - suppose you were going to a job where you'd be paid $200 per day for the week, but if you were late on your first day you got fired. I'd say the ticket was worth it :laugh:
 

MacGuffin

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ENTP ennui???

Back off extraverts! That's an INTP thing!
 

simulatedworld

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suppose you were going to a job where you'd be paid $200 per day for the week, but if you were late on your first day you got fired. I'd say the ticket was worth it :laugh:

Haha, the belief system we're mocking is totally how a lot of people approach poker. It's so silly.

People will throw $100 at a $5 pot just to show how big their balls are, and the fact that it usually wins is used as justification for its merit.

Nevermind the fact that it has to work 19x as often as it fails to actually make money ^_^
 

jenocyde

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Holy shit, I feel that you guys are speaking from my soul. I think about death every single day. I'm not obsessed with dying but it's always present and waiting. I've been prepared since I was a little girl, and I'm not scared - it's just another part of the journey. But I can't even begin to tell you how many near misses I've had.

I push myself so I can feel life. I love flying and I know I will die in a plane crash or from crashing out of the sky. I'm obsessed with being in the air. I'll be that idiot girl base jumping to my accidental death. I'm actually working on my pilot's license now.

The apocalypse thing made me laugh. I fantasize (and get excited) about crashing on a remote island and having to survive. I know I could never make it back, since I'm shitty with directions, but I could probably survive for years in the wild until I decide it's time to end it - on my own terms.
 

Synarch

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I remember when I was a teenager studying the Tudors and I learned about St Thomas Moore you know, how when he was executed for his beliefs, he died gracefully and with a smile and a joke with the executioner. I was fascinated by it and read his biographies and loads of stuff about him, and how he sorta wrestled in prison with the instinct for survival and fear of death, and just became totally accepting of it.

Well, all you can do is come to terms with it. It is a problem with no solution.

I'm not surprised by your fascination. In a way we are all in the shadow of the gallows. I just expect that as I get older and my mind and body deteriorate I'll be ready to let go of life.

Really made a mark on me actually. I've made a point of forcing myself to remember that I'm mortal, regularly, really think about it. Just makes you have like, no interest at all in all the BS in life doesn't it? Like let's just cut that all out and gtf on with it. When I worked as a chaplain and had to visit people in their deathbeds and stuff, so many of them saying they wished they'd realized sooner that all that status, popularity, keeping up with the joneses, vanity stuff was BS and they wish they'd thought about what really mattered younger and put their energies into that.

The problem with this is, it's too easy to start seeing literally everything as meaningless bullshit. Why should things have meaning? I think this is the central question. Why do we need meaning? What is meaning?

Eh, what are we doing talking like this, we're the shallowest of the NT's, remember, or isn't that what they keep saying? ;)

Shallow waters run deep.

Don't you hate when people say things like, "I HOPE THE EXTRA 15 MINUTES YOU SAVED BY SPEEDING WAS WORTH THE 200 DOLLAR TICKET LOL"

I just don't like worrying about what the speed limit is at any given time.

Holy shit, I feel that you guys are speaking from my soul. I think about death every single day. I'm not obsessed with dying but it's always present and waiting. I've been prepared since I was a little girl, and I'm not scared - it's just another part of the journey. But I can't even begin to tell you how many near misses I've had.

I push myself so I can feel life. I love flying and I know I will die in a plane crash or from crashing out of the sky. I'm obsessed with being in the air. I'll be that idiot girl base jumping to my accidental death. I'm actually working on my pilot's license now.

The apocalypse thing made me laugh. I fantasize (and get excited) about crashing on a remote island and having to survive. I know I could never make it back, since I'm shitty with directions, but I could probably survive for years in the wild until I decide it's time to end it - on my own terms.

Yea, I really enjoy stories like Robinson Crusoe or war stories things like that. Where the nitty gritty of life is laid bare.
 
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